From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
This is The Daily.
For four months, hundreds of men from Venezuela said they endured physical abuse, mental abuse and sexual abuse inside a notorious prison.
Today what my colleague Julie Turkowitz found actually happened inside that prison and why many now see it as perhaps the darkest chapter of all in President Trump's program of mass deportation.
It's Monday, December 8th.
Julie, you have spent the past many months investigating the plight of these roughly 200 Venezuelan nationals who were deported by the Trump administration from the US to a prison in El Salvador.
And along the way, you have broke story after story about who they are, what they did or didn't do.
And now you bring us your latest investigation.
So tell us what animated that latest probe and what you found.
So I think that so many listeners remember back in March when these 250 or so Venezuelan men were put on planes to this foreign prison in El Salvador, accused summarily, without trials, of being terrorists.
And then, in a very, very public way, taken off the planes, bent at the waist shackled, shaved and put in this maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Right.
It was the most indelible image in President Trump's mass deportation campaign because it felt the most unfamiliar and kind of brutal.
Absolutely.
And I think that it was meant to send a message.
This is what will happen to you if you come to the United States illegally.
And after that, the men disappeared.
They did not have access to lawyers.
They did not have access to family members.
There were family members in Caracas in the United States marching asking for some kind of information about their loved ones.
You had courtroom tussles in the United States with lawyers trying to get these folks back to the US or at the very least try and find some kind of information about what had happened to them.
Right, which was met with a wall of resistance from the Trump administration, who basically said take our word for it that these are the worst of the worst.
Absolutely.
And we as journalists asked over and over again, please give us information about these men.
Give us their names.
Their names were never released.
And we also asked for information about their criminal histories.
But the Trump administration refused to give us sort of a list describing the different alleged crimes that had been committed by all of these men.
The only ways that we found out who they were was through leaks.
Right.
And so it began to feel like a pretty endless black box.
Correct.
Correct.
And then over the summer, there is a breakthrough.
And we start to hear that there are talks happening between the US government and the Venezuelan government in which the US government is considering releasing these 250-some men from this Salvadoran prison.
And one day in July, this is exactly what happens.
These men are released and sent to Venezuela.
And finally, we have the opportunity to find out what actually happened to these men on the inside.
So I immediately begin speaking with a team of reporters who I work with who are inside Venezuela.
And I ask them to race out and begin to document the reunions of these men with their family members.
And from there all of us as a team, three Venezuelan reporters, a Venezuelan photographer and myself, we begin these sort of methodical interviews of these men, talking to them about their experiences and what they experienced, lived through on the inside.
We start collecting and cross-referencing their stories, going back, doing follow-up interviews to confirm timelines facts, narratives in general.
We start photographing their injuries, their physical conditions, talking to them about the after-effects of what they experienced, gathering medical reports from doctors they've seen, And what emerges is this pretty clear and very consistent account of widespread abuse among the men inside the prison.
The abuse that they describe is physical.
It is psychological.
At times it is sexual abuse.
And in many cases, the men describe it as torture.
And by the time we finish the reporting, as a team, we have interviewed 40 of these men.
Tell us about one of these men that you spoke to, whose story is very consistent with what you heard from all 40.
Sure.
Luis Edison Chacon is a young man from Venezuela whose story is really representative, I think, of the stories of so many of these men.
He is a father of three.
He comes to the United States from Venezuela in 2023.
He comes with his family.
Like so many of these guys, he says that he's fleeing a really bad economic situation.
And also that he is following this flow of people that came up through the Darien Gap.
Right.
And he's working in Milwaukee.
He is working for Uber as an Uber Eats driver.
Right.
And the way that he tells the story is that he is with his son and they are doing Uber Eats deliveries and they go to McDonald's and he gets an order for a hamburger.
So he is making this 11 McDonald's delivery when he is pulled over by the police and told that he has a taillight out.
And this is what sort of begins his journey to this maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Well, surely it wasn't just a taillight out.
Turns out that Luis had had some previous scuffles with the law.
He, in 2024, had been accused of domestic violence, and the case was later dismissed.
He also had been accused of stealing some things from a Walmart, and that case was still pending, so he had been charged with theft and was awaiting the next step in the case.
He is taken to the police station, and it is also in this place where he says that officials noticed some scars on his leg and say something to the effect of you know, we've got to look out for this guy.
These could be bullet wounds.
And they also looked suspiciously at his tattoos, he recalled.
And why does all that end up mattering?
What we know is that in many cases, the Trump administration was using tattoos as a sign that these individuals were gang members and, in fact, had a rating system that it used to determine who was a supposed member of a gang and then to send people to this prison.
We have no evidence that Luis Chacon is or was a member of this gang, Render Agua.
Just like we have very little evidence that many of these men were members of this gang.
Nevertheless, they were sent to this prison and the Trump administration has said publicly that they were all part of this gang.
And what does Luis describe as his journey to this prison in your conversations with him?
Luis Chacon has a very interesting journey to the prison in El Salvador.
He describes asking to be deported to Venezuela.
I wanted my deportation immediately because I had three children who depended on me.
He does not want to extend his time at all in detention because he knows that he needs to get out and be somewhere where he can make some money to support his family.
And he believes that he is being sent by the United States to Venezuela.
He has heard about these men going to El Salvador.
He's very scared that he's going to be sent to El Salvador.
He says that he was assured that he was not going to El Salvador.
And then he is loaded onto this deportation plane.
But eventually they do land in El Salvador, and the men who were on these planes described looking out their window seeing a sign that indicated that they had arrived in El Salvador and just the terror of realizing that they might be staying there.
They talked about Salvadoran guards getting on the plane.
One of them talked about sort of trying to tighten their seatbelts in this feeble attempt to stay on the plane.
And then, of course, being forced off of the airplane, and these guards are just bending these guys at the waist, slamming them down the stairs against vehicles onto buses and bringing them into this feared prison, where they are forced to their knees, where they are shaved And eventually thrown into these prison cells, which have these four plank metal beds that someone described as a sort of living morgue.
And Luis specifically recalls being told, This is hell?
This is hell?
You will leave here only in a body bag.
We'll be right back.
So, Julie, what are the conditions that Luis and the rest of these Venezuelans find in this prison?
So the men are divided into cell blocks, approximately 10 men in each cell.
They are given bunk beds, metal, most often without any kinds of mattress or sheet.
The water is a sort of open cistern.
They're supposed to use that water to drink as well as to bathe.
They're supposed to drink their bathing water.
Correct.
They also say that they are consistently denied medical care.
There is one man named Aldo Colmenares who comes into the prison with diabetes.
He tells officials there he has diabetes and needs insulin.
He said that he was denied insulin for five days.
He's eventually given birth.
Wow.
Wow.
He's eventually sent to an infirmary where he says that a doctor told him he should just resign himself.
It is time to die.
It's stunning.
And for the most part, what these men speak about is just constant physical abuse.
This means beatings, being kicked and dragged, And it also means restraint positions.
Many of the men spoke about a position they called the grua position, the crane position.
They were forced to kneel for hours and handcuffed behind their backs and then at times lifted by the handcuffs to put pressure on their shoulders and backs, and sometimes also stomped on their feet and hands while in this position.
It sounds like torture.
This abuse goes on for months and they talk about getting to points of extreme psychological desperation.
And one day they sort of start to crack and they decide that they're going to stop eating and ask for better treatment.
And they decide that they want to write their messages back.
They take some metal from the beds and cut themselves.
And using their own blood, write on the sheets messages like, we are not criminals.
We are migrants.
And they hang these sheets everywhere. from what they called the piping in the cells.
I mean, they are that despondent that they are writing messages of protest in their own blood.
That's how far gone the situation has become.
Exactly.
I don't think that they believed they had any other options.
And this was something.
But what happens next is an even bigger rebellion.
In May, there's a guard search of one of the cells.
And during this search, officials beat...
A man so badly that he is bleeding from head to toe, according to Luis.
And this sets off so much anger that some of the inmates dislodge metal parts from their bed and use the metal parts to open cell doors.
And for a moment, some of these men have this taste of something like freedom.
Then, of course, they immediately realize that they are completely outmatched by the guards.
Luis tells us, they retreat into their cells and that is when the guards begin going cell by cell and really punishing the men, shooting them at point blank with what they call rubber bullets in the hand, in the head, in the leg.
My photographer colleague traveled around Venezuela photographing these men.
And you can see one of them has this gash down the front of his face that he said was caused by a rubber bullet that ricocheted off of his forehead.
Okay.
There is another man who said that he was shot in the thigh with a rubber bullet and has this really sort of gnarly welt in his thigh that we documented.
What happened after the shooting?
Did these men get any kind of medical treatment?
So they talk about asking for medical care following these injuries, and some of them were eventually taken to an infirmary.
The man with the bullet in his leg, for example, talks about it being removed without any kind of anesthesia.
Hmm.
And Luis describes how, after this attempted rebellion, what really happens is there is a sort of new wave of punishment and repression inside the prison.
And what does that look like?
So there is an isolation room in the prison that the men spoke to us about.
They call La Isla the island.
And these men say that the island is really the place where some of the most depraved acts occurred.
Luis speaks about experiencing punishment that included having his head dunked in water, as if the guards were attempting to drown him.
And you know this is pretty graphic for some of our listeners, but one of the inmates talks about being taken there alone by several of the guards wearing hoods who forced him to perform oral sex in this space.
Julie throughout this period, as all these horrific actions are allegedly occurring, are these men able to speak to anyone in the outside world through phone calls emails, anything?
These men are denied access to the people they want to speak to.
During this entire period, they receive two important visits one from Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, and from the Red Cross, which speaks to them, interviews them and delivers a report to the government of El Salvador, but never makes that report public.
Right.
And as we know, Secretary Noem praises this operation.
So it would seem she did not hear these kinds of accounts from these men.
We don't know what Kristi Noem heard while she was inside the prison.
What we know is that these men felt so powerless that several of them began to contemplate suicide.
Luis is one of these men.
Luis is one of these men.
He had heard inside the prison that if one person died, maybe all of them would be able to go free.
And he gets a sheet.
He gets up on one of the beds.
And he indicates to his fellow inmates that he's going to hang himself.
And they pull him down.
He said were it not for these men, mis compañeros, I would not be here today telling you the story that I'm telling you.
I want to ask you what might seem like a somewhat insensitive question, given the really shocking descriptions from these men.
But I think as journalists we have to ask it.
How do you and our colleagues go about making sure that this harrowing testimony is true?
This is a very important and fair question.
Of course, we interviewed 40 of these men.
Their testimonies were consistent with each other's.
But we weren't inside the prison.
We couldn't speak to the guards.
We couldn't speak to officials in El Salvador.
And so we wanted somebody else to help us understand how much we should believe these testimonies.
And so we reached out to a nonprofit group of forensic experts, and we provided them with a summary of the testimony as well as photographs of the injuries, in some cases, doctors' reports.
You basically asked them to audit your reporting. correct.
And what they said was that the testimony and the other evidence that we provided were consistent and credible.
And they said that in their assessment, much of the abuse that was described met the United Nations definition of torture.
And I think it bears repeating that this is torture inflicted on men whose deportation to this prison was not based on any normal legal process.
They were never tried on allegations of being terrorists.
In fact, the only judge who ever touched their case was was a federal judge in the US who tried to stop the flights carrying many of them from ever landing in El Salvador, an order that the Trump administration pretty much ignored.
And in the case of Luis yes, there are charges of theft in the US that in theory might merit a regular old deportation.
But in no world would the allegations against someone like him ever seem to justify beatings and torture in a prison in El Salvador.
Correct.
I'm curious what motivated the release of these men if inevitably releasing them would mean that they could tell these stories to the world, stories of essentially torture.
It's a good question.
And I think that many of us following the story thought that these men might spend the rest of their lives in this prison.
But the Venezuelan government, which wanted the release of these men... had a bargaining chip.
And that bargaining chip is that the government of Nicolas Maduro, the country's autocrat, had been detaining US citizens and US residents inside Venezuela over the last year.
And so, by July, had amassed a sort of group of 10 US prisoners in, And the government of Venezuela negotiated with the government of the United States the release of these 10 US citizens and residents in exchange for the freedom of these now 252 men who were in the Salvadoran prison.
So in the end, it's Maduro, not Trump, who forces these men's awful saga to come to an end.
Yes, I mean, the Maduro government definitely has a hand in securing these men's freedom.
So I just want to reflect on what happened in this prison and why it happened.
And at the end of the day, it happened because the Trump administration wanted it to happen.
And I'm old enough, and I suspect you are too, to remember when the United States had to reckon in a very visible and official way that with the idea that it had carried out torture systematically after 9-11 to those that the US had detained in response to those terror attacks that year.
And when the conduct that occurred to these detainees was revealed, American officials members of Congress— were so offended and so convinced that it betrayed America's values that they released a report documenting it so the whole country could see it.
And they said, this will never happen again.
And here it is, again not conducted by the US per se, as it was after 9-11, but this time in a sense outsourced to a foreign country by American government officials.
How should we think about that?
It's hard to imagine that US officials did not have some idea that something like this was going to happen inside the Salvadoran prison.
Just two years before these men were sent there, the U.S. government released its own report.
It's a public report saying that there was strong reason to believe that torture was happening inside the Salvadoran prison system.
Wow, they knew.
They knew.
And I mean.
One of the questions I have is why there has not been more outrage about what these men experienced inside this prison.
Why we have not seen the same kind of outrage that we saw after 9-11.
And why do you think that is, if you had to make an educated journalistic guess here?
Yeah.
It's very interesting that the Trump administration and the Bukele administration didn't really try and hide any of this.
Donald Trump came into the White House promising to address the immigration problem at the border in the country in general.
And he promised to deter migration.
And that is what he has done.
I mean, the numbers at the U.S. border are way down.
And what I was thinking about a lot as I was reporting this story is how far basically, are Americans willing to go for migration deterrence?
And you know, when we went to the Trump administration with our findings, they did not deny any of the testimony.
Instead, a spokeswoman said to us that we should be focusing our reporting elsewhere, specifically on children who had been killed by quote vicious illegal aliens.
Hmm.
I mean first of all, that suggests that the men who end up in this prison in El Salvador have killed children, and I don't believe you found any evidence of that.
Putting that aside, this sounds like a spokesperson for the White House basically saying to the New York Times we've seen all your reporting, we've seen these accounts of torture of men we put in this prison and our response is who cares?
Which is very striking.
Correct.
And I should mention that the legal door is still open for the Trump administration to continue sending people to El Salvador.
Correct.
I want to end by asking you what has become of men like Luis now that they are released?
Have they achieved anything resembling normalcy now that they are back in Venezuela, a country, of course, that they had sought to flee, which is why they came to the United States in the first place?
Now they are back having been through this experience.
What are they saying life is like right now?
Sure.
Well, Luis, for one, is separated from his family.
His partner and their three children are in the United States.
All of these men talked about suffering pretty intense psychological pain.
As well as physical problems.
They talked about blurred vision, recurring migraines, trouble breathing.
Many of them described themselves as zombies, essentially.
This sounds like a form of PTSD.
For sure.
They talked about not being able to sleep and, when they do sleep, experiencing a sensation of feeling like they're back in the prison.
And one of the men in particular described going to bed and hearing the rattle of handcuffs, the voices of Salvadoran officials and the clang of his cell door.
Well, Julie, thank you very much.
We appreciate it.
Thanks, Michael.
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to know today.
Since this policy has started, we've gone from 20000 cases of acute hepatitis B down to 20 per year.
Isn't that amazing?
20,000 to 20.
On Sunday, the Republican chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Bill Cassidy, recommended that parents vaccinate their newborn babies against hepatitis B, despite a controversial vote on Friday by a federal panel to end that decades-long recommendation.
Cassidy said that the government's original recommendation, dating back to 1991, had prevented thousands of infections and warned that babies who do become infected with hepatitis B are at much higher risk of long-term health problems.
Those who are infected at birth, 95% of them become chronic carriers.
So what does it mean to be a chronic carrier?
It means that you're at risk for end-stage liver disease, for liver cancer, for infecting other people.
But if you vaccinate at birth, that never happens.
And later today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major test of President Trump's power.
The case revolves around the question of whether Trump can fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency, simply because she is not aligned with his political agenda.
An existing law says that the president can only remove commissioners for wrongdoing or for neglecting their duties.
A ruling in Trump's favor would overturn 90 years of legal precedent.
Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Michael Simon-Johnson, with help from Eric Krupke.
It was edited by Patricia Willans, with help from Lexi Diao.
Contains music by Diane Wong, Mary Lozano, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.
Special thanks to Tibi Syromera, Sheila Ordeneta, Isa Yen Herrera, and Adriana Larrero-Fernandez.
That's it for The Daily.
I'm Michael Barbaro.
See you tomorrow.
